Innocent Little Crimes Reviewed By Sandy Graham of Bookpleasures.com

Sandy Graham

Reviewer
Sandy Graham: Born and raised in Canada, Sandy spent 35 years with
The Boeing Company in a variety of engineering and management
positions. After retirement, he satisfied a long-standing urge to
delve into creative writing.Sandy has authored three
novels, Two Loves Lost, The Pizza Dough King and Murder – On Salt
Spring?

Innocent Little Crimes
piques curiosity at the outset and increases its grip as the pages
flit by.

Lakin says the story was
inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. To better
assess the originality of this novel I felt compelled to dust off
Agatha’s classic for a quick refresher. There are similarities.
People guilty of crimes outside the reach of the judicial system
brought together on an isolated island to encounter deserved
retribution. But this story is much more than an old plot skeleton
fleshed out in 21st Century life style.

Lakin’s innocent little
crimes are only innocent if one allows the perpetrators to ignore
their potential harm. In fact, they deliver a psychological blow to
Lila Carmichael that she never recovers from in spite of her later
fame and fortune. They are not little except in the eyes of the law,
which fails to consider them crimes. Still, they are merely at the
destructive end of the scale of innocent little crimes we all commit
without recognizing how hurtful they can be to others. Sometimes
nothing more than an ill-chosen word can cause life-long damage.

The prank that all but
destroys Lila festers in her mind for fifteen years while the
culprits live on ignorant of its impact and her determination to
wreak revenge. Lakin does a masterful job of developing the
characters, taking us into their heads to understand their thinking,
motivation and actions. She sets a hook in the prologue by telling us
one won’t survive and we spend the whole book trying to predict the
victim.

Actually, everyone is a
victim of psychological destruction in one form or another. The story
shows vividly how revenge destroys its seeker as surely as it does
the victims. Revenge is not a dish best served cold. It is best not
served at all. One tends to wonder how all their lives, especially
Lila’s, would have turned out if forgiveness could have been
substituted.

The
story also sent me searching through my aging memory for innocent
little crimes I might have committed and wondering in retrospect what
impact might have resulted. In short, like all good novels, the story
provokes thought. It is well written with excellent dialog and
character depth. But above all, it is a fast paced psychological
thriller that will keep you engrossed to the very end.